On Saturday we had the first Swiss Alpine Adventure Avalanche course run by the guides from Rock and Powder. With 24 participants the course was a great success, everyone seemed to have enjoyed themselves and more importantly everyone learned and practised what to do in the event of an emergency in the mountains.
At 9am we were complete and quickly split into four groups and made our way up onto the mountain. A quick traverse from the top and a few powder turns to get us down into the mood and we started doing basic exercises with avalanche transceivers. Once everyone had practised basic transceiver use and how to use their avalanche probes we discussed a little bit about what to do in the event of an emergency before skiing back to the bottom of the lift and going for lunch.
Of course prevention is better then cure so over lunch we discussed a little on how to avoid getting involved in an avalanche in the first place. Our guides distributed information on risk reduction methods and answered any of the many questions we had on staying safe in the mountains.
After lunch the guides set up staged incidents for us to deal with. We had avalanche debris fields marked out and multiple burials (not all wearing transceivers!) to deal with. The situations were made as real as possible with everything from calling the emergency services to dealing with an injured victims in the field. I’ve done a number of avalanche courses before and this is the first one that we simulated a real emergency on. It was one of the most worthwhile exercises I have ever done with respect to safety in the mountains.
Thanks to everyone who came. It was the people who participated in the course who made the day such a big event.
Keep an eye on the Facebook page for more events soon.
